Films Showing

Heroic Purgatory

Heroic Purgatory

1970 / 118min / DCP

DIRECTOR: YOSHISHIGE YOSHIDA

CAST: MARIKO OKADA, KAIZO KAMODA, NAHO KIMURA

Past, present, and future appear to overlap in the timeline of this enigmatic, labyrinthine, constantly innovational film, in which a scientist working for the Atomic Agency is recalled back to his seeming involvement in a left-wing activist group in the wild 1950s when a teenager appears at his home claiming that to be his daughter—the beginning of an impenetrable mystery that ties into the rise and fall of dissident organization in Japan. Co-starring Yoshida’s own wife Mariko Okada, Heroic Purgatory exemplifies the director’s genius for idiosyncratic compositions, shot in deliberately overexposed black-and-white, with the square Academy ratio frame used for strikingly claustrophobic effect.